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Sunday, 26 June 2016

Transformers Combiner Wars Bruticus, Part 4; Brawl: I wonder if he too, is playing soccer with other tanks

Side note, does World of Tanks really need a Rocket League mode? Part 4 of Bruticus, and now we move onto our tiny tank unit... may or may not have Fire Emblem on the mind for this one as I just finished playing Birthright, and as we are doing an army team after all... I'll try to avoid FE jokes... until I get to either Fates' review or if I can get an opening impression out for Tokyo Mirage Session #FE (Don't have it yet, waiting to get paid for IRL work first). Time to send in Brawl, and potentially piss of Melee fans (I never said I'd avoid Smash bros jokes).

Starting off in vehicle mode, and he is a tiny tank... that has tab issues. While my copy has gotten better after transformations, many have reported that the tabs that connect the 3 portions of the tank treads don't really lock in, leading to gaps. Even mine, which is better, still has little gaps in it which could annoy people. The colour is also a miss sell, being more of a brown rather then dark green. Apart from that though, what you see is what you get. It has little wheels so it can roll (something I wished some third parties would do), the barrel can go up and down, but the turret doesn't swivel due to transformation. But what it can do is lift up and you can have a tank with a robot head that uses a turret for a hat... I find it funny at least.

Leg mode: It's a slightly compressed tank with a tiny foot on the end. Like with Swindle, the hand foot guns don't really work as feet for these two. What also makes this one worse is that on my copy, Brawl's hand foot gun tolerances are crazy. Swindle's fingers were actually loose, but that doesn't really matter based on the shape. Here though, the thumb is super loose and as that's the heel spur, that could topple Bruticus. But the fingers are so tight that I need to use a little screw driver to get the fingers out. I couldn't have at least gotten the other way around like with Swindle? I should say, that's likely to be different for each copy of the toy, QC does mess up every now and then, and it could be far worse. What isn't just QC's problem though is the Arm mode, which is one of the worst arm modes I've seen. The robot legs/ lower arm comes apart too easy, there's nothing for the robot arms to do so they tend to get in the way, and I find it kinda easy to knock the robot pelvis out, casing the broken arm look. What affects both of those though is the combiner peg, which when combine, feels a little loose compared to the other Combatacons.

Robot mode then, and yes, this is one of the weakest in the team. While play-ability is ok, the arms are messed up in terms of joint positions, thanks to transformation, giving him what looks like boxing gloves dangling off of 2 thirds his arm. To make it somewhat better, I arm mount his gun, which is the barrel of the tank. The pelvis looks like the team ran out of their budget, which surprises me as the line was 70% repaints. It looks like he's suffering from some sort of muscle degeneration illness and trust me, its even easier for it to come undone here then it is in arm mode.

Is he the worst transformer I've ever owned? No, I had Armada Hotshot, and he is still more pose able then Perceptor. But as is, he's going back to leg mode now and probably staying that way. Up next for toy reviews, the Combiner boss of the team, Onslaught along with the reviews of Shockwave, and Bruticus himself. Until then, see you on wednesday with Mario Kart Wii again.